Author and editor Dale Pitt was born in Chicago, Illinois on July 22, 1931. She received a bachelor's degree in theater arts and English from UCLA in the early 1950s. She wrote an episode for Goodyear TV Playhouse, edited books such as Decline of the Californios, and indexed works such as The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti. She is best known for writing Los Angeles A to Z, an encyclopedia on the city and county of Los Angeles, with her husband Leonard Pitt. The encyclopedia includes 2000 entries in 600 pages and they were working on a revised version when she died of a stroke on August 10, 2008.